The Zypper man page also mentions the history file – beginning with the description of the “patch” command:
So installation, update or removal of packages may change the classification of patches refering to these packages. Since libyzpp-17.23.0 the /var/log/zypp/history remembers if a commited transaction changes a patchs classification. If history data are available, patch tables show a column telling since when the patch is in it’s current state.
Unfortunately, there’s no mention of the Zypper history file ever taking care of it’s size …
- In my experience, it doesn’t do it well – the size before the log rotation is triggered is 10M …
- The logrotate configuration files for Zypper are located in ‘/etc/logrotate.d/’ …
To work around this, I occasionally truncate ‘/var/log/zypp/history’ with an editor – I manually discard “from the very beginning” until “a month or so ago” …